Unions Protest Film Championing Charter Schools

How in the world did a movie get made that was catalyzed by “parent-trigger” laws allowing parents to take over failing schools? A movie like that, which implies teacher’s unions simply aren’t doing their jobs, should never have made it past the iron gates of liberalism that surround Hollywood.

Yet “Won’t Back Down,” which stars Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Holly Hunter, and revolves around a parent and teacher struggling to turn around a failing school, somehow got produced and had its premiere yesterday at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City. And just which groups do you think showed up to protest the movie, yelling, “Move on over, corporate takeover?”

Union members, that’s who. It made made the cast a little nervous. No one crosses the unions and works in Hollywood. (Note: The protests took place near the Warwick Hotel where Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was staying for this week’s visit to the U.N.)

Gyllenhall said that she came from “the most progressive left. I wouldn’t be allowed to go home for Thanksgiving if I made an anti-union movie.”

Lance Reddick, who plays Viola Davis’s husband, said:

I don’t know. I just know that things need to change. The other thing is I’m not really about gutting teachers’ unions because I’m a member of three unions, and I wouldn’t be able to make a living if I wasn’t.